Kill Your Idols: On Kamala Harris & Representation
Vice President Kamala Harris being sworn in on January 20. Photo by Kevin Tanenbaum.
A Momentous Occasion
On January 20th, Kamala Harris was sworn in as Vice President of the United States. The Inauguration was framed as a new dawn for Americans who felt forgotten, mistreated, or ostracized under the previous administration. Many were quick to note the historic significance of Harris’s entering the office of the Vice President—she became the first woman, first Black person, and first South Asian to hold the office. Her inauguration was celebrated by many across the country in recognition of the various identities she holds. Her alma mater, the historically Black Howard University, commemorated the moment with 49 bell tolls, representing Harris’s becoming the 49th VP. Worldwide, members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority—of which Harris is one—donned the organization’s traditional pink and green colors and pearls and tuned into the inauguration from their living rooms, having been forced to cancel plans to be present for Harris’s momentous inauguration as a result of the January 6th insurrection. Harris, too, could be seen wearing pearls at the Inauguration, just as she did the day she was sworn into Congress in tribute to her sorority. It was evident that Harris’s inauguration was meaningful for people across all walks of life.
The Power of Representation
There are tangible benefits to seeing oneself represented in a positive manner. Research has shown a significant relationship between television exposure and children’s self-esteem. For white boys, this relationship was positive: increased television viewership was related to increased self-esteem. For Black girls and Black boys, as well as white girls, increased television viewership was related to a decrease in self-esteem. Even in media intended for children’s consumption, Black boys and girls of multiple races are presented with far more negative representations of themselves than white males are.
Research has shown that mass media representations inform how we see others and how we see ourselves. Dr. Mary Beth Oliver of Pennsylvania State University argues that the media has played a critical role in the oppression of Black men by presenting them as archetypal villains and as violent beings. This depiction has taught others, specifically those with the power to act on their anti-black biases such as armed police officers, that they should assume Black men to be threatening and aggressive. Black women suffer as a result of poor representation in the mass media as well. The three stereotypical portrayals of Black women in the mass media—as the maternal, masculinized mammy; the promiscuous Jezebel; and the combative, ill-tempered, loud sapphire—all serve to distance Black women from victimhood. Despite Black females suffering higher rates of victimization than their white counterparts, the media underrepresents the rate at which Black women are victims of violence in favor of pushing the narrative of Black women as deviants, deserving of the harm that may befall them.
Vice President Harris’s inauguration demonstrates that people relish in the opportunity to see themselves in positions of power, positions that command respect. For people who often see themselves presented in the media as villains, criminals, and otherwise unworthy of grace and respect, the media storm surrounding Vice President Harris’s inauguration may have been more psychologically beneficial than the mass media intended it to be.
Kamala Harris and the Police State: An Intimate Relationship
But how heavily should representation impact who we elect to be our political representatives? Are we then to say that it is enough for politicians to hold office because of the benefits they may pose to our self-esteem, even if they fail to live up to campaign promises and have harmed people that look like them in the past? Representation aside, the idolization of Kamala Harris—a career prosecutor with a documented history of upholding antiblack systems and working against Black people—in a year where so much public mobilization intended to dismantle systems of harm against Black people has been so readily available is baffling.
As a prosecutor, District Attorney of San Francisco, and Attorney General of California, Harris’s track record with wrongful conviction cases was abysmal. Often, the effects of these cases were Black people’s burden to bear. Despite many convictions being the result of evidence tampering, false testimony, and suppression of crucial information, Harris fought to uphold these convictions and served as an institutional roadblock on the road to justice for many. In 1985, Kevin Cooper was sentenced to death for the murder of four people. His trial, however, was far from fair: some evidence was planted, other evidence was hidden from his lawyers, and even a pair of bloodied overalls belonging to another possible suspect were thrown out. Cooper fought for years for advanced DNA testing to bolster his appeals and get him off of death row. As AG, Harris blocked this testing at every route until a New York Times expose forced her hand. In another case, Daniel Larsen was sentenced to 28-to-life for possession of a concealed weapon. Though there was evidence of his innocence, Harris argued on a technicality that he did not raise the appeal in time in order to keep Larsen incarcerated (luckily, she failed). These are just a few examples of the many where Harris had the power to exonerate the wrongfully convicted—many of whom were people of color—and instead chose to punish them further.
Even after years of harsh criticism for her unwillingness to push for justice in these cases, Harris takes little responsibility for the harm caused by her departments. Harris jokes lightheartedly about smoking marijuana during her time at Howard University, yet nearly 1600 people were convicted on marijuana-related charges in the state of California while she was in office. When looking just at her time as District Attorney of San Francisco, 24 percent of marijuana arrests led to convictions during her tenure, compared to 18 percent under her predecessor. In 2015, legislation was proposed that would require all California officers to wear body cameras as a way of mitigating officer abuse of power. She denied the proposal her support. For years, California state residents protested against Harris’s refusal to investigate the officers involved with police shootings. Harris claimed that it was not her job. After everything that 2020 brought to the forefront, considering how intimately we have been forced to grapple with the state’s violent apparatus and police officers’ unchecked power to derail and destroy Black life, how can we possibly overlook what Harris’s record makes clear? She is no champion of Black lives.
Representation is the Bare Minimum
Black people, children especially, deserve to see positive representations of ourselves in the mass media, but this cannot be our guiding principle when deciding who to hand power over to. Mainstream Black politics often falls into a dangerous trap: politicians fail to do the work to benefit the Black community as a whole but earn themselves cultural capital by being relatable and pushing the importance of representation. They become cultural icons (see: Vice President Harris-related merchandise on Etsy such as this and this) rather than political representatives.
In a prior piece, I argued that the Black community has too often been presented with settling as our best option. We have been taught not to ask for too much. I tremble to think that we are living in a political climate where asking for politicians that represent us, both in appearance and in ideology, is “asking for too much.” While I understood the joy that many felt when seeing Harris inaugurated, I, myself, could not feel that joy. While I understand the value of positive representation in the mass media, I am wary that representation will be taken as a suitable replacement for actual political change. I am certain Kamala Harris’s Black identity meant something to voters who supported the Biden-Harris ticket. Yet, it did not mean anything to her when it came time to stop the California state penal system from keeping Black people wrongly incarcerated. When it comes to politics, Black people must kill our idols. Or, at the very least, we must kill the desire to see ourselves represented if it proves a hindrance to holding our politicians accountable. Otherwise, we risk it being used against us by politicians as a cop-out for their antiblack pasts, and as the bare minimum that they will offer us when what we truly need is representation that disempowers antiblack systems.
Eriife Adelusimo is a staff writer at CPR and a junior in Columbia College studying Political Science and Public Health. She possesses a special disdain for electoral politics.